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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Weakness Unleashed

We all have weaknesses that we try not to let others see. All of our lives we have been told that we must hide it from the world unless we want the world to laugh and ridicule us. It is often something that is painful for people to admit their short comings because of the uncertainty in others reactions. Most times we lie, cheat, or steal rather than admit our personal failures in our lives. Our weaknesses have such a huge influence over what we do that sometimes we don't even know we are covering up for them.

One of my biggest weakness was/is my feelings of inferiority compared to others. During the beginning days of college and all throughout graduate school there would always be the idea in my head that I was mediocre and didn't belong. So to compensate for a perceived lack of intelligence I would routinely put in more time and effort into what I was doing to mask the fact that I just couldn't grasp certain concepts faster than others. Even when I was doing decent work, I always had the need to appear to be more brilliant than I was. I almost burned out multiple times during school because of my incessant drive to "fix it". To try to allay this weakness, I have been working on viewing things from a proper perspective so that I can be more accepting of myself.

Another weakness has been my lack of eloquent writing and grammar skills. Even taking as many language arts and English classes throughout the school years. I have always had a limited ability to write or write consistently. As an engineering major, I hid my writing skills quite easily as there just wasn't a focus or need to expand in that area. Math was always more important than my ability to compose passages. Although as time went on, my writing skills deteriorated as atrophy set in. Hence my ability to write technical papers also took a hit. It was only recently that I have decided to put a major effort into regaining these skills as now it is more important to me than ever before.

Finally, a third major weakness has been my inability to change certain beliefs or mindsets that I have maintained throughout my college years. As much as I taut and promote growth, there was a huge part of me that has/is constantly resistant to change. It was only when I moved to SF, that my rigorous beliefs were challenged. I have a certain way that I like to do things, as everyone does, and so I falsely believed that people would be the same in SF area as they were when I was at USC. This led me to just wait for people to come to me to hangout rather than me being the initiator. Meeting people is hard when you get into the working world and I was damned if I was going to change myself for others. Now, I have slowly adapted and am starting to branch out and do Meetup groups and other outreach activities. Although, I find this weakness still the most difficult to deal with.

My point is that we all have core weaknesses that we have to deal with in our lives. It can be incredibly difficult to call out and name your weaknesses, and even harder to try and change them. I can't say that I have conquered the mountain of my own weaknesses, I fear that it will take me the rest of my life to mitigate them. But the key is to learn from your own weaknesses and understand where it comes from and how you can work with it rather than ignore it.